Over the past two years I’ve been hard at work on my book, The Recapitulation Diaries, which will be published in three volumes over the next couple of years. The first volume, which covers the first year of my three-year-long intensive shamanic recapitulation, is pretty close to finished with an expected e-book publication date later this summer. Our plan is to publish first as a Kindle e-book followed by a print-on-demand version through Amazon’s publishing house, a fine way to avoid needless costs, waste, and storage issues, as well as allowing for an extremely reasonable sale price.

The Recapitulation Diaries are compiled from the fifty diaries I wrote during my recapitulation process, which documented just about everything that was happening as I explored completely blocked childhood experiences. Today I offer some excerpts from that recapitulation process which began in earnest about ten years ago.

Here is an excerpt from a journal entry made on September 7, 2001:

“Soul in pain, mind in torment, in quiet moments the old stuff comes to haunt. I know I won’t be able to handle the onslaught of it alone and I wonder how long I can keep it at bay. It pushes at me, prodding for attention. I wish I knew where it all came from. Whatever it is that haunts me sits heavily inside, in hidden places, not where I can see, not where I want to go. It lets me know it’s there by protruding outwardly, poking at me, showing me images of ugliness, showing me painfully deep memories, like glimpses of old icons painted in excruciating detail or ancient rounded Mycenaean forms solidly built to stand erect for centuries, guarding, waiting for me to turn to them, for they hold the secrets. I see big-eyed Etruscans peering out from deep within, looking for daylight, begging to be let out, heavy stone sculptures, weighing on my soul, numbing my thoughts. A lump of stone catches in my throat. No forklift big enough to remove it, I carry its weight always within, barely able to breathe, to speak, to swallow.”

Here is what was coming through on September 16, 2001:

“What lies inside keeps eating away at me, chomping away, nagging at me until my insides are as raw as chapped lips, as painful as cracked and blistered hands. No one sees the pain, the bloody mess of memories I hold inside, like buckets of afterbirth torn and ripped from my body, leaving pain and cramps in a place no one can go. Even I can barely reach that far down to soothe and comfort the wounds that fester inside me.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I don’t remember enough, though so much stuff nags at me. I can’t seem to let it go and I can’t get past it either. No matter how hard I try to push it away, it won’t let me ignore it. There are too many things bringing back memories.”

“Visual images flash like lightning and in a split second I’m lost in the woods again. A sigh, a profile, the nape of a neck, and suddenly a flash of pain stabs through my heart, my gut, and something deep inside is torn out of me and thrown to the ground where it lies kicked and bruised and yet I cannot bear to tend to it, except to stuff it back inside, to push its bloody mass back inside.”

And then I finally have a breakthrough understanding:

“The pain of knowing has finally hit. Up until now, I have mostly been experiencing the realization that something was drastically wrong in my past, each new memory sending me reeling as I understood, for the first time, that something had happened to me as a child. But now, as each memory surfaces, I know that something happened to me when I was a child because I’m feeling it.”

“At first it was all in my head, as I tried to grasp, to figure out just how it could have happened, as I tried to get my head around the incredible disbelief of it. But now it’s settled in my body, in my stomach, a deeply buried, barely reachable pain of truth. And now I understand what Chuck meant when he told me that I didn’t need to go searching for the memories, that they would come of their own accord, when I was ready.”

Here is what it was like to experience an emerging memory:

“Too many memories, some clear, some hazy, are trying to make themselves known but I can’t shake the blurriness from my eyes to get the whole picture. It’s like trying to peer through a black scrim or screen, like squinting at a tiny television set at the end of a long dark tunnel.”

“Often I’m in the woods, those haunting woods filled with dread, doom, and fear. Then I step out from the woods into light and sunshine, leaving all the bad stuff behind. In just a few steps I go from intense fear, just a few small steps and I come out into goodness and light, shedding fear like an old snakeskin. But something stays behind in the damp cool woods. There’s a shadow sitting on the dirt-packed ground with the leaves and odor of decay.”

“As I go deeper into this memory of dark and light, I find that I’m able to turn around and look back at the woods once I’ve emerged into the light, but I cannot go into them. I am only able to walk out into the sunlight, over and over again…”

Thanks for reading! I’m looking forward to finishing the first book. My intent in publishing The Recapitulation Diaries is to share what total freedom means, offering a means of achieving not only total healing and freedom from trauma but also from the fixations and trappings of this world. The Recapitulation Diaries revision trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—and life itself—as a shamanic journey.

I’ve returned from that journey whole, unburdened, and with fluid access to heightened awareness. AND I no longer live every day in fear, as I once did. I have come out of the dark woods of my childhood into a clear new light. It’s what I hope for everyone.

Until next week—love and light,
Jan